Many think of Hanukkah as a lighthearted Jewish holiday, perfect for plying kids with presents, an observance that plays second fiddle to Christmas in consequence and cash outlay in a majority Christian country.
Sam Arbiser thinks of the Festival of Lights differently, not only as a commemoration of the flame that burned miraculously for eight days at Jerusalem's ancient Temple on one day's worth of olive oil, but as a time to remember loved ones lost in the Holocaust.
The 92-year-old Atlantan, who hasn't completely retired from the machine manufacturing company he sold a decade ago, has created a lasting reminder of that loss. The skilled sculptor has designed a 4-foot menorah in memory of his family members and relatives of his wife Pola, who were extinguished because of their faith.
Crafted in the shape of a towering tree out of thick plate brass, the 120-pound menorah is displayed in the living room of their long-time home in the Mason Mill area of DeKalb County, in front of a window overlooking a forest of bare trees. A dedicatory plate at its base is inscribed "In Memory of Our Families" and, on another line, "ZL" -- short for zichronam livracha, Hebrew for "Of blessed memory."
But as Arbiser discussed his creation one recent afternoon, his wife and artistic inspiration quietly sitting in a wheelchair next to his, the tone is more bittersweet than solemn.
The sculptor is quick to explain an important distinction: He is not a survivor of the Holocaust that took the lives of both his parents, his sister and a brother, a grandfather, aunts, uncles and cousins. He escaped it. Then the loneliness, language issues and anti-Semitism he encountered after leaving his family in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in 1939 for a five-year exodus in Siberia gave him a surprisingly positive perspective that he has carried with him for more than seven decades.
"All of these contribute to my ability to compare my life now and enjoy the present," he wrote in "An Unlikely Life," a collection of autobiographical stories he self-published as a keepsake for family and friends.
And while he thinks every day of loved ones who died, especially during Hanukkah, when Jewish families reunite, he nonetheless adores the observance. He enjoys the ritual lighting of the menorah and gift-giving to grandchildren (son Jack and daughter Sherry, both Atlantans, have provided seven).
"It is a beautiful holiday, a joyous holiday," he said. "People are giving each other presents. And it’s not just religious. It’s historical."
Jack Arbiser, an Emory University School of Medicine professor, commends his father's open-armed approach to life, calling him "a remarkable example of strength in the face of adversity."
Those challenges came early. A third generation engineer, Sam Arbiser took Hitler's message of hate seriously, escaping Warsaw into a Soviet-occupied section of Poland at age 20, not long after graduating from a school of industry and trade.
On the first page of his book, he recounts his heart-rending departure after his mother accompanied him and a friend to the city of Malkinia by train: "I said to my mother, ‘See you soon,' but when we separated at the border, it was the last time I saw her. I still have the image of our last separation in my mind -- how my mother looked, the train."
The Soviets shipped him to Siberia, and, after many close encounters with hunger and death, he landed in Kemerovo, where the skills he and his brother Nate had learned at his grandfather's foundry helped them get admitted to a college-level machine-building institute.
They had a few successful exchanges of letters with his family, who described the dire conditions in Warsaw for Jews. The young men even sent packages of food home, but the contact ceased after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
Stories of Germans killing Jews traveled to them, yet nothing prepared Sam for his return in 1945, a journey of 31 days by boxcar to the Polish border. Arriving in Warsaw penniless, he was hopeful that his family had survived because his father had worked in the German military industry as a young man.
But no names from the family were on the list of survivors, all of them having been exterminated, he found out later, at the Treblinka death camp. He headed to his home at Mila 37, only to discover, "There was no house, there was no street. The whole Jewish area of Warsaw was destroyed. Just rubble of bricks."
In his book, he recounts his feeling as he surveyed the site: "I dwelt there for some time, asking a question: ‘Where was God?'"
The healing came slowly, beginning in earnest with a 1950 move to Israel. There, he rose though the ranks to become chief engineer at the country's largest machine-building company and met his wife. Pola had her own Holocaust story, surviving by hiding with her mother and sister at her Christian nanny's home for three years in Drohobycz, Poland (now part of the Ukraine).
A decade later, they moved to Atlanta, where they have been long-time members of the Congregation Beth Jacob and contributors to the William Breman Jewish Heritage and Holocaust Museum. (Its theater is named for the Arbiser family.)
Eventually, he plans to donate his 4-foot brass menorah to a suitable institution, just as he donated another tribute to his family. "The Worker," a 10-foot steel sculpture depicting a man pushing a cast iron wheel, is displayed at Emory University near the athletic field entrance.
At 92, Sam Arbiser is not finished commemorating his loved ones either. Two tributes to his grandfather, nearly completed tabletop sculptures of a foundryman and a blacksmith, sit on the dining room table.
The final detailing can wait for after Hanukkah, which he and Pola will celebrate, fittingly, in the embrace of family.
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